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It, moreover, is impossible to ascribe to Brahman, whose nature is constituted by eternal free self-luminous intelligence, the consciousness of Nescience; for what constitutes its essence is consciousness of itself.
His feelings translated themselves into vision, and he saw a sight that caused him to turn pale. A gigantic, self-luminous sphere was hanging in the sky, occupying nearly the whole of it. This sphere was composed entirely of two kinds of active beings. There were a myriad of tiny green corpuscles, varying in size from the very small to the almost indiscernible.
Nor can you say 'Brahman'; for Brahman is nothing but self-luminous intelligence, and hence contradictory in nature to Nescience, which is avowedly sublated by knowledge. 'The highest Brahman has knowledge for its essential nature: if Nescience, which is essentially false and to be terminated by knowledge, invests Brahman, who then will be strong enough to put an end to it?
The beautiful comet of 1811 became the object of that celebrated astronomer's conscientious labour. Large telescopes showed him, in the midst of the gazeous head, a rather reddish body of planetary appearance, which bore strong magnifying powers, and showed no sign of phase. Hence Herschel concluded that it was self-luminous.
But the Soul dethrones the tyrant, by perceiving and steadily affirming that the psychic self is no true self at all, not self-luminous, but only an object of observation, watched by the serene eyes of the Spiritual Man. Nor could the Mind at the same time know itself and things external to it. The truth is that the "mind" knows neither external things nor itself.
A ninth-magnitude companion, distant 159", p. 146°, and two others, one of twelfth magnitude at 78", p. 317°, the other of thirteenth magnitude at 126", p. 183°, may be distant satellites of the great star, but not planets in the ordinary sense, since it is evident that they are self-luminous.
Or, to put it otherwise that essential nature of Brahman which is apprehended through the cognition that Brahman is knowledge, itself shines forth in consequence of the self-luminous nature of Brahman, and hence we have no right to make a distinction between that knowledge which constitutes Brahman's nature, and that of which that nature is the object, and to maintain that the latter only is antagonistic to Nescience.
On the theory, on the other hand, of a Brahman that is nothing but distinctionless intelligence even the witnessing function of consciousness would be unreal. Further, on the theory of Brahman being mere non-differenced light it would be difficult to prove that Brahman is self-luminous.
It is true that nebular matter, as now observed, is believed to be, partially at any rate, self-luminous. But this fact, supposing it to be such, is not inconsistent with a still earlier time when light had not yet begun.
On the contrary, we must believe that the universe is infinite, and that it is filled with self-luminous and opaque worlds, many of them inhabited; that there is nothing above and around us but space and stars.
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